tweebot 0.2.1

A simple twitter-bot command-line tool and library

tweebot

A twitter bot client, written in Python. This can be used as either a command-line tool, or as a library imported into your Python applications.

Requirements

1. Python 3.3+

2. A twitter account

Installation

To install:

make install

Development

To build the dev environment:

make venv
. venv/bin/activate
python main.py

Configuration

The application will only try to tweet if you provide a key file, which is formatted like:

CONSUMER_KEY: dsafsafafsd
CONSUMER_SECRET: iuhbfusdfiu44
ACCESS_KEY: vjhbv99889
ACCESS_SECRET: ivfjslfiguhg98

OR the equivalent JSON.

The filename must be provided using the --keys command-line argument.

Command-line usage

Tweeting

To tweet a simple status update:

tweebot --keys {twitter-key-file} tweet "Hello world, this is my Tweebot status update!" -vv

You can control verbosity with the number of vs.

More command-line options are possible, try --help to see them all.

If you use - for the tweet text, the application will use standard input, which can be handy for piping info from your bots – ie, use an arbitrary application to pipe to tweebot which can tweet it out.

Following

To automatically follow new followers, and unfollow unfollowers:

tweebot --keys {twitter-key-file} follow --auto

Library usage

There are two basic ways you can use this in a library: you can either import the TwitterClient class and control that from your application, or you can import tweebot’s main function and provide it with a callback that will generate your status updates.

tweebot.main

If you provide a callable to tweebot.main, then tweebot will use it as a callback when the main function is called. The main method implements all the command-line tweebot arguments, the difference is that if the program is asked to tweet an empty status, it will instead tweet the results of your method, called with no arguments. If you tweet a non-empty status, that string will be handed to your method, and the result will be tweeted:

mytweebot --keys {twitter-key-file} tweet -vv

Thus, this provides a simple way to define new twitter-bots: define a method of the form:

def my_tweet_builder(status, directives):
    new_status = do_something()
    return new_status
    # or
    return new_status, new_directives

This can either ignore the status it’s given, or use it in any way you wish. If you have multiple bots that modify the status when given, then you could run them independently, or pipe them together in novel ways without recompiling – your choice.

Direct client use

If you want your application to be in control, you can simply import tweebot.TwitterClient and use its methods directly. This includes direct API access (via tweepy) to twitter, and few custom, convenience methods.